Why I Can't Support Sarah Palin

"You have to read this, Rachel,” my mom said, showing me the NYTimes Week In Review. “You’re younger than me, you’re smarter than me, and you’re more articulate than me (Note: it’s times like these when I doubt this the most). You have to be able to speak up to the people who support her!” I know whom she’s referring to. Like a god who’s name need not be uttered to instill reverence or fear, Sarah Palin is the “Her,” the “That woman,” who spent time on every television in my house last week. She’s a moose-killing, pregnant-child-rearing, lipsticked pitbull from Nowhere Alaska, and even my 53 year-old mother in Southern California is afraid of her bark.

Of course, my mom is not the kind of voter McCain was after when he chose Palin as his running mate. She’s pro-choice, anti-war, and pretty indifferent when it comes to marriage as an institution for anyone. She’s also a voracious New York Times reader who grew up on the East Coast and has consistently voted Democratic.

I’m the kind of voter Sarah Palin hopes to lure in, along with the Jesus fish and hockey-moms. I’m young and female, a first-time voter who thinks women could run the world if they would just take their heels off. I’m hopeful about the future (if not then I wouldn’t be writing this). And I want change for this country so we can stay ahead. But I’m not necessarily buying the kind that packages itself as the candidate for “Hope” and “Change.”

John McCain is 72. Reverse those digits and you get the age I will be in eight-years, possibly at the end of Sarah Palin’s second-term as president of the United States. Let me tell you why I don’t think anyone my age should risk that eight-year investment:

She speaks in tongues
It doesn’t bother me that Palin supports the U.S. troops in Iraq (her son will soon be joining them), as long as she listens to advisers who tell her it’s time to pull out. It also doesn’t bother me that Palin is against abortion, or that her 17 year-old daughter Bristol chose to keep her pregnancy. Good for her. As long as Palin will let less-fortunate teenage girls get abortions. But like a Pentecostal preacher channeling a higher power, she’s speaking about these issues in tongues. And this time it’s not God’s language, it’s the Republicans’.

As a student at the University of Chicago, I’m a bit caught up in the growing, libertarian leave-me-alone youth-culture. You know, the idea that people should do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm others. It used to be called conservativism. So I can’t support a candidate who thinks that there is only one way to do things: God’s way. Iraq is not God’s war; it belongs to the Republican Party, whose year 2000 presidential candidate wanted to start it and 2008 presidential candidate wants to continue it. God did not call upon Sarah Palin to run for vice-president, McCain did. And while we’re straightening things out, no, I don’t think Barack Obama is the Democrats’ savior.

The Palin Doctrine
If this My Way or the Highway mentality sounds familiar, that’s because it’s straight from the Bush Doctrine. Sarah Palin didn’t recognize the term when Gibson asked her about it in her first interview, and this supposedly highlights her lack of knowledge and experience when it comes to foreign policy. But she actually knows the doctrine that mired our country in war with a nation that didn’t attack us and spent seven years fear-mongering to unite Americans against “unpatriotic” dissenters very well. She just knows it as the Palin Doctrine, or her instincts.

Palin told Gibson she supports Georgia in its conflict with Russia and wouldn’t mind making Georgia a NATO country (meaning the U.S. would have to go to war with Russia to defend it), Palin and McCain are also still pushing for “victory in Iraq,” and linking the conflict to al Qaeda seven years after 9/11 even though Gen. Petraeus and the Iraqi people are calling for time-tables for troop withdrawal.

She doesn't blink
That’s what Sarah Palin told us of her decision to accept the vice-presidential nomination in her interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson. But that lack of eye-batting has also made her very good at swatting lies right at us.

*She lied about supporting the "bridge to nowhere."
Palin supported the project until it became unpopular and garnered national notoriety, then she spoke out against it.

*She lied about saving Alaskans money by selling the government’s executive plane on eBay. The plane ended up selling at a loss, and now Palin is charging the state for all her trips on commercial airlines, including her trips home.

*She lied about her decisions to fire government workers, including her ex-brother-in-law. Now She’s using her executive power to override the Freedom of Information request made for the emails she exchanged during those firing periods.

Palin v. the Supreme Court
Excuse my ageism (there’s a word that’s taken a backseat to racism and feminism on the Straight Talk Express in the past months), but McCain could die, very soon, and so could several of our venerated but varicose Supreme Court Justices. If this happens, Sarah Palin will likely have the opportunity to influence the courts rulings on reproductive rights, the definition of marriage, and the sanctity of life—all issues that divide the country along religious lines.

I have a lot riding on this election. In the next four years I will graduate college, enter the workforce and face the impending economic recession. I don’t want a pig with lipstick or a woman with egg on her face leading me through the most formative years of my life.